The present invention relates to machines for packaging unit doses of medication. In particular, the present invention relates to an improved guide wheel for positioning pills, tablets, and capsules at a proper location in the packaging process and further relates to software for printing medication information on unit dose packages.
There are many instances in pharmacies and hospitals where it is desired to individually package unit doses of certain medications. This is usually accomplished by placing the medication (normally in pill, tablet or capsule form) in packaging such as a strip packages. Packaging machines such as the Euclid Cadet (also see U.S. Pat. No. 4,493,178 which is incorporated by reference herein) are presently employed to place unit doses of medication into individual packages. As suggested schematically in FIG. 1, the packaging device 1 typically employs two lengths of coated paper (or plastic film) 2a and 2b which are supplied by rolls 3a and 3b. For purposes of the present application, this type of packaging machine may be referred to as a dual tape fed packaging machine. A rotating pill guide wheel 4 is positioned above the paper and has a series of pill sized apertures 5 formed around the wheel's perimeter. The rotation of the guide wheel moves the pills 6 to a point where the pills will be deposited through a drop chute 16 to fall between the two lengths of paper. A pair of heated sealing jaws 7 and 8 will move to engage the sections of paper where a pill has been deposited and will melt a seal around the perimeter of the paper in order to form an individual package enclosing the pill. Each package is then typically either cut off from the two rolls of paper into separate packages or formed into long strips of packages which are perforated between each package for later separation by a nurse or pharmacist. The ongoing operation of this process will form multiple individual packages or a long string of perforated “strip packages” 9 such as seen in FIG. 2a. 
The front side 10 of the strip packages 9 will normally be formed of a transparent plastic material such that pills 6 may be seen. The rear side 11 of strip packages 9 will be formed of a material which may be printed upon and a color (e.g. white) which will contrast well with printing ink. Typically important information regarding the drug being packaged is printed on side 11 of the individual packages by a printer incorporated into the packaging machine. This information might include the name of the drug, the dose, the expiration date of the drug, and a bar code representing the National Drug Code (NDC) number. Currently, packaging devices incorporate printers which allow a user to enter several lines of text and an NDC number. As suggested in FIG. 2B, the printer will print the lines of text 12 and a bar code 13 representing the NDC number on each unit dose package.
Because it is desirable to carefully position the pill in the center of the strips of paper, the pill apertures on the guide wheel are very close to the size of the pills. Therefore, it is necessary to have different guide wheels (having different sized pill apertures) depending on the size and shape of the pills being packaged. Also, different sizes and shapes of drop chutes are necessary to properly center and orient the pill in the center of the package so the pill does not protrude out of the package or get crushed in the packaging process. It is often a time consuming task to switch the guide wheel and the drop chute when starting to package a pill of a different size or shape than that of the pill which was last run with the packager. It would be a significant improvement in the art to provide a guide wheel which could be used with a wide range of pill sizes and shapes and which would not require more than one size of drop chute. Additionally, it would be an improvement to provide label printing software which significantly enhances the functionality of the label printing process by simplifying the label design process and reducing the manual input of data.